Description
Book SynopsisThis book is a work of original scholarship that makes a strong contribution to our understanding of French cultural memory. Despite the scholarship and political activism devoted to keeping the memory of the Paris Commune alive, there still remains much ignorance both in France and elsewhere, about the traumatic civil war of 1871 and particularly about the terrible retribution meted out by the French state on its own citizens; some 20,000 to 35,000 people were killed on the streets of Paris in just the final week of the conflict.
Colette E. Wilson identifies a critical blindspot in French studies which since the 1960s has focused primarily on representations of the Commune by writers and artists who were either Communards themselves or at least sympathetic to the Communard cause. New critical approaches are instead set to work on neglected texts (by Maxime Du Camp), marginalised aspects of the illustrated press (Le Monde illustré), early photography (Char
Trade Review
‘Colette Wilson’s tightly focused Paris and the Commune, 1871-78 is an excellent contribution to the scholarship on the Commune and its memory.’
Casey Harison, University of Southern Indiana, H-France Review Vol. 19 (February 2019), No. 22
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Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
1.Introduction
The Paris Commune 1871
Remembering and forgetting the Commune
The case studies
2.Le Monde illustré: Images Between the Lines
An illustrated world view
Language and icons, memories and myths
The fire in the key: the memory of the image
The moral modern metropolis: a Walker’s guide
3.Du Camp’s Paris: Between History, Memory and Reportage
Reconstructing the archive in Paris: ses organes
The Commune as prostitute in Les Convulsions de Paris
4.Zola’s ‘Art of Memory’
Le Ventre de Paris
L’Assommoir
Une Page d’amour
5.Paris and the Commune in the Photographic Imagination
Politics, memory and aesthetics in Soulier’s Paris incendié, mai 1871
Changing perspectives in Baldus’s Les Monuments principaux de la France
Pictures at an exhibition: Marville’s hygienic view
6.Conclusion
Appendix: Chronology of key events 1871-1880
Bibliography
Index
